Granted, Harris can sometimes sound like an unreconstructed hippy and Glissant a New Age spiritualist; but both are very aware of the violence that both creates and sustains human cross-cultural interaction. They just seek to not privilege the violence and inequity as the end of the interaction, and they dare try to understand how productive those brutal interactions have also been. They challenge us not to reduce history to the violence of interaction; or at least, not without paying equal attention to the products of that violence. In fact, it was Glissant who made what I consider the single most controversial claim in the history of racial conversation in the Americas, if not the world. “Western thought,” he writes in Caribbean Discourse, “although studying it as a historical phenomenon, persists in remaining silent about the potential of the slave trade for the process of creolization.”[10] Few would publicly make such a statement, at least not in the United States or the Caribbean. He’s challenging us to engage the potential of slavery, to see slavery as the laboratory of modernity that we imply yet hesitate to fully attribute. And that a Black thinker (anyone, really; but particularly a product of chattel slavery) to suggest that slavery is being silenced for its productive contributions—that anything positive be publicly attributed to the enslavement of Black people—is remarkably contentious; yet it is the silent assumption upon which much thought and culture rests. Sadly, in terms of public articulation, the closest thing we have to that argument is that old tradition of salvific racism where whites tried to convince Blacks that they should be grateful to slavery for having brought them to the light of Christ or into the Western world
Louis Chude-Sokei - Blackness and Becoming: Édouard Glissant’s Retour (2018) [The Black Scholar, 48:4, 43-53]